# Kea 2.5.1 Release Notes, August 30, 2023 Welcome to Kea 2.5.1, the second monthly release of the 2.5 development series. As with any other development release, use this with caution: development releases are not recommended for production use. Kea is a DHCP implementation developed by Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) that features DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers with DNS update and a REST API; optional database support (MySQL and PostgreSQL); optional RADIUS, Kerberos, YANG/NETCONF, and GSS-TSIG support; and much more. Kea provides extensive management capabilities, including but not limited to: TLS support, Role-Based Access Control, run-time configuration monitoring and updates via a REST API, host reservations, and client classification. The text below references issue numbers. For more details, visit the Kea GitLab page at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/issues. The following bugfixes and features have been implemented since the previous release, version 2.4.0: 1. **Ping-check design**: One of the few ISC DHCP features that are still not available in Kea is ping-check. This ability to attempt detection of duplicated addresses by sending an ICMP Echo (ping) message before offering an IPv4 address is currently in the design phase. We now have a design and a skeleton hook implementation that is being reviewed. Interested users are invited to share their comments in the tickets or on the kea-dev mailing list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-dev) [#3008, #3012]. 2. **RADIUS refactoring design**: Existing Kea support for RADIUS is lacking in several areas: it is based on a patched version of FreeRADIUS-client, which is difficult to install and maintain; it's also not multi-threading-capable and the nature of its code makes it almost impossible to adapt for parallel operations. Therefore, we have begun to substantially refactor Kea's RADIUS hook to no longer use FreeRADIUS-client. This is a complex effort that will take multiple releases before reaching a usable stage. So far, we are in the refactoring design phase [#3027]. 3. **Subnet4-update extended**: The `subnet4-update` command, part of the subscriber-only hook library `subnet_cmds`, has been extended slightly and now logs information about the subnet being updated [#2982]. 4. **Consistency update**: Kea has hundreds of configuration parameters; the overwhelming majority of them use dashes (`-`) as separators. However, only one, `output_options`, used an underscore (`_`). This was confusing and some users reported this as an annoyance. Starting with this release, Kea uses the dashed version (`output-options`), while still honoring the deprecated version (`output_options`) [#2904, #3003]. 5. **Usability improvements**: The client-id is now included in the EVAL_RESULT message [#2854]. We clarified some documentation examples, so they no longer refer to the non-existent agent commands hook [#3001]. The DHCP4_CLASS_ASSIGNED log message now works properly with shared networks [#2908]. 6. **Documentation updates**: Subnet selection by specifying an interface for a subnet is now documented [#2968]. A small correction to the documentation of the `-D` option of perfdhcp has been fixed [#2995]. A new diagram explaining how Kea recognizes whether a client is the same as a previous one was added [#2908]. 7. **Build improvements**: A problem with header inclusions has been fixed; the code now builds properly on OpenBSD [#2970]. A warning about array-bounds warnings on Ubuntu and possibly other distributions has been fixed [#2821]. The IOSignalTest.mixedSignals test has been improved and no longer fails on an Ubuntu 22.04 VM [#2954]. ## Incompatible Changes 1. `output_options` has been deprecated and replaced by `output-options`; this option is used in the Kea logging configuration. The deprecated version (using an underscore) is still accepted. For details, see item 4 above. ## License This version of Kea is released under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0 Some Kea hook libraries are provided under the MPL 2.0; others are licensed with the Kea Hooks Basic Commercial End User License. The source for each hook library includes the applicable license. ## Download Pre-built ISC packages for current versions of the most popular Linux operating systems are available at: https://cloudsmith.io/~isc/repos/ The Kea source and PGP signature for this release may be downloaded from: https://www.isc.org/download The signature was generated with the ISC code-signing key, which is available at: https://www.isc.org/pgpkey ISC provides detailed documentation, including installation instructions and usage tutorials, in the Kea Administrator Reference Manual. Documentation is included with the installation or at https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html in HTML, PDF, or EPUB formats. ISC maintains a public open source code tree, wiki, issue tracking system, milestone planner, and roadmap at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea. Limitations and known issues with this release can be found at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/wikis/known-issues-list. We ask users of this software to please let us know how it worked for you and what operating system you tested on. Feel free to share your feedback on the Kea Users mailing list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-users). We would also like to hear whether the documentation is adequate and accurate. Please open tickets in the Kea GitLab project for bugs, documentation omissions and errors, and enhancement requests. We want to hear from you even if everything worked. ## Support Professional support for Kea is available from ISC. We encourage all professional users to consider this option; Kea maintenance is funded with support subscriptions. For more information on ISC's Kea software support, see https://www.isc.org/support/. Free best-effort support is provided by our user community via a mailing list. Information on all public email lists is available at https://www.isc.org/community/mailing-list. If you have any comments or questions about working with Kea, please share them to the Kea Users list (https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-users). Bugs and feature requests may be submitted via GitLab at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/issues. ## Changes The following summarizes changes and important upgrades since the 2.5.0 release. 2174. [func] fdupont Added a new information message which displays the client and the transaction identification information for received queries between message unpacking and first classification. (Gitlab #2854) 2173. [bug] tmark Fixed a sporadic failure of IOSignaltest.mixedSignals unit test. Test no longer relies on signals arriving in order they are sent as it cannot be guaranteed. (Gitlab #2954) 2172. [func] fdupont Completed and improved logs showing what client classes are assigned to queries during processing. (Gitlab #2908) Thank you again to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible. We look forward to receiving your feedback.